Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Apple Inc.(NASDAQ:AAPL)’s iPads were selling like hot
cakes on Black Friday while demand for Microsoft Corporation(NASDAQ:MSFT)’s Surface
tablets were not even lukewarm at the opening weekend of the shopping season,
analysts said.

Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray, who tracks Apple
faithfully, said that Traffic at Apple stores in Minneapolis was up 31 percent
on Black Friday vs. a year ago, likely driven by shoppers wanting to see the
iPad Mini.

In fact the supply of the smaller iPads was not able
to keep pace with the demand for the device.

"We believe the lack of supply of the 16 GB
versions had a measurable impact on Black Friday (iPad) Mini sales,"
Munster wrote.

Compare that with what he observed about Microsoft.
According to Munster Microsoft's retail store had 47 percent less traffic than
Apple's nearby store, Munster said.

During two
hours of observing customer traffic, Piper Jaffray noted that shoppers at the
Microsoft store bought 3.5 items per hour (mostly Xbox games) versus 17.2
products per hour for the Apple store across the hall.

In effect customers are willing to pay for the tried
and tested Apple products rather than experiment with untried Microsoft
products.

According to analysts customers are waiting for the
company to release a version of Surface running the Windows 8 operating system
on Intel chips. Current Surface models run Windows RT on low-power ARM-based
chips.